From the Institute's Photo Library

From the Institute’s Photo Library doi:10.1111/j.1751-8369.2009.00104.x

In 1899, these three Inuit men from north-west Greenland visited the second Fram expedition while it overwintered in Rice Strait, the narrow waterway separating Pim Island from Ellesmere Island’s eastern coast. The Norwegian expedition was led by Otto Sverdrup (1854–1930), and included cartographer Gunnar Isachsen, geologist Per Schei, botanist Herman Georg Simmons and zoologist Edvard Bay. It explored the north-west coast of Greenland and the region around Ellesmere Island, in what is now Nunavut, Canada. By employing elements of Inuit and Saami clothing, technology and practices, Sverdrup’s expedition held out from 1898 to 1902, recording valuable observations on the ﬂora, fauna, geology and oceanography of the region, and charting the virtually unknown western coast of Ellesmere Island. A group of islands to the west of Ellesmere was discovered, which Sverdrup named after the expedition’s benefactors, and claimed for his country. Norway formally ceded the claim in 1930, shortly before Sverdrup’s death. Otto Sverdrup, who led or participated in a number of important polar expeditions, including Fridtjof Nansen’s famous ski-crossing of Greenland in 1888, is one of the great ﬁgures of Norwegian exploration.

The Norwegian Polar Institute’s Photo Library preserves some 90 000 polar-related images, captured during the last 135 years, including glass plates and slides, stereo images, print photographs and modern digital photographs. Images documenting Norwegian activities in the Arctic and Antarctic comprise the bulk of the collection. Scanning the older images and registering newer ones is an ongoing endeavour. To date, digital versions of 30 000 pictures are available in a searchable online database at http://sivert.npolar.no/fotoweb. The keywords for searching the online images are mostly in Norwegian; please send an e-mail to [email protected] if you require assistance with searching the database.